See big data insights

Cosmos Bank, the dominant player in Taiwan's cash-card market, uses SAS® Visual Analytics to dive into its big data for up-to-the-minute customer intelligence and risk management. As a result, board members and risk managers can make the most informed decisions at the right time to help the bank maintain an edge over the competition.

Cosmos is the largest issuer of cash cards in Taiwan – 560,000 in all – and it controls 57 percent of the market for cash loans. With such high volumes of customer and transactional data accumulating by the minute, Cosmos turned to SAS for a high-performance solution with real-time discovery capabilities.

With SAS Visual Analytics, the risk management team no longer needs to rush out management reports for board meetings. Instead, bank executives have instant access, via PC or tablet, to the latest insights based on the latest data, which enables them to make smart decisions swiftly and confidently.

Now, Cosmos can analyze data instantly. Less time spent processing the data means more time for making good use of it. Along with higher-quality decision support, bank executives gain real-time insights for risk control, business development and financial management.

This is an era of visualization, so we should provide ranking officers and board members with eye-catching tables and charts that help them quickly grasp the meaning of the data provided and make informed decisions.

James Lin
Chief Risk Officer

Available and affordable

Cosmos started using SAS in 2006 for information management, data integration and analytics. By integrating corporate and consumer data, Cosmos gains advanced decision support for risk management and product marketing.

Building on that foundation, SAS Visual Analytics provides a big data solution with instant access to large stores of information and data analysis that is fast, smart and mobile -- as James Lin, Executive Vice President and Chief Risk Officer, puts it: "technologically available and cost-affordable."

Cosmos Bank's board members had received static reports in PowerPoint. When the board required more details, risk managers could not always respond instantly due to technology and resource constraints, which sometimes resulted in missed opportunities.

Shared visualizations

With SAS Visual Analytics, board members and risk managers can run their own analyses and discovery without requiring extensive IT support. They can generate and share their own reports, dashboards and visualizations simply by clicking or drilling into items of interest.

For example, senior management can break down cash-card issuance by branches, sales representative and other ways. And the bank gains customer insights that help it offer the right products at the right time, freeing analysts to spend more time understanding the business than creating reports.

"This is an era of visualization," says Lin, "so we should provide ranking officers and board members with eye-catching tables and charts that help them quickly grasp the meaning of the data provided and make informed decisions."

Board members access reports via secure internal networks. "If they want even more details, all they need to do is select the relevant tables or charts, and they have immediate access," Lin says.

With SAS, Cosmos can reduce the time senior analysts routinely spend on accessing data for other users; hence, they can shift their time and effort to more sophisticated jobs that create more value for the bank.

Competitive edge

The ability to analyze big data in real time helps Cosmos design the right mix of products and services that win new customers and keep existing ones happy and loyal.

With SAS, Cosmos can process and analyze each transaction throughout the month for a more accurate view of each customer's behavior so it can extend the right offer at the right time.

"When other banks offer our customers loans with lower interest rates to pay off their cash advances from Cosmos, we would not want to respond by lowering our rates, too," says Lin. "We prefer not to enter a price war. Instead, we should rely on our data analysis to understand the behaviors of our customers -- their transaction histories including the timing of drawdown and repayment patterns. That way, we can focus on business that makes sense from a risk-return point of view. Our goal is to establish a close bond with the customers for sustainable profits."

Challenge

Get the most from big data to make the most informed decisions at the right time.

Solution

Benefits

Executive management has access to up-to-the-minute risk intelligence and customer intelligence for decisions that keep the bank ahead of its competitors.

The results illustrated in this article are specific to the particular situations, business models, data input, and computing environments described herein. Each SAS customer’s experience is unique based on business and technical variables and all statements must be considered non-typical. Actual savings, results, and performance characteristics will vary depending on individual customer configurations and conditions. SAS does not guarantee or represent that every customer will achieve similar results. The only warranties for SAS products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty statements in the written agreement for such products and services. Nothing herein should be construed as constituting an additional warranty. Customers have shared their successes with SAS as part of an agreed-upon contractual exchange or project success summarization following a successful implementation of SAS software. Brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies.